Across Franklin County via 80m

I knew it would work – it's only about 26 miles and just over the horizon – but until you actually get it to work, it's best to assume that it doesn't work.  A friend in the Carrabelle area just put up a low 80m dipole (i.e., NVIS sky-warmer), and I've got that 21' zepp stretched horizontally over a rooftop at my place downtown that sort of tunes 80m – the new grounding system has helped a lot – so we had to test this potential link.  Works great, 25 watts was enough to make the hop, and 50 watts cleaned the signal up considerably, so check that box, 80m (i.e., near 3.9 MHz) works well enough for cross-county comms off my tiny zepp.  Good to know, good to have tested and made work.  Will test further this week with the North FL Phone net.

Inset: propagation wheel showing the best bands for this hop.  Surprisingly, 30m looks good here too, but that's digital-only (counting CW as digital), and we were using voice.  As usual for NVIS work, the real answer is 80m by night and 40m by day.  Be sure to click to embiggen the image, because squinting that hard would be ridiculous.

Green line is the short path (26 miles), red line is the long path (24,000 miles).

That accomplished, I dialed over to WSM to listen to the Grand Ole Opry and ran smack into Old Crow Medicine Show's short set.  Not having checked the schedule, that was a treat.  Later, dishes done and while reading the manual for the FT-710, I flipped on WSM again to maybe pick up the Opry's second show, and there they were again.  Second helping!